


Strangled With Our First Breath

by Sour_Idealist



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alpha Timeline, F/M, Illustrated, Post-Scratch, Way Behind Canon Updates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-14
Updated: 2012-04-14
Packaged: 2017-11-03 16:06:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/383353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_Idealist/pseuds/Sour_Idealist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hollywood's most famous power couple: Dave Strider, award-winning director, and Rose Lalonde, bestselling author and media sensation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strangled With Our First Breath

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this before Act 6 Intermission 3, so it's now no longer canon-compliant, but I... didn't want to let it languish and gather dust on my hard drive, so I'm now posting it anyway. Warnings for slightly unhealthy relationships to alcohol.
> 
> Fanart at the end is by [Paperpie](paperpie.tumblr.com), and is what inspired this in the first place!

The limousine hums against your hands, and you flick your pocket-watch (ornate silver, custom-engraved with your own invented arcane symbols and the shape of an open rose) out of your purse, check the digital display. You’re going to be late.

Dave is watching you already when you look up to him, and a single eyebrow makes an appearance above his shades in confirmation. The clock seemingly embedded in his brain tissue is one of those mysteries you have very deliberately never quite examined, along with the way you smudged your eyeliner along his lids one night and looked back at yourself, and the way you can never quite look straight at your daughter, and the words that used to appear on the pages when you kept a notebook beside your bed. (“Words” is, perhaps, over-generous.)

“When a puppet lingers a beat behind, he becomes a rebel soldier,” he drawls, flicking a scrap of paper across the seat, every line of his suit and his mouth shouting arrogance and mockery. You fail, as always, to keep the slow warm smile from leaking around the edges of your mouth, and you cover his hand with your own. _Complacency of the Learned,_ Volume II, page four hundred and seventy-eight in the hardcover edition. You fought for that line in every single draft, and winning that battle probably cut your life expectancy short by at least three years.

“Yo, dude,” you retort, pronouncing the words with all the dignity of Shakespeare, “look at me I’m being a hero and sitting on my ass on the couch at the same time. And no hands.”

He snorts. “Knew you watched it sober.” He eyes the tinted window, and you watch the muscles tighten in his jaw, think about tracing them, but you worry about staining the silk of your gloves. “I need to refine that stuff for the next film. I mean, not that it’s not awesome already –”

“Indeed, everything that you touch turns to gold,” you interject.

“– but She’s not going to let that slide past the censors again,” he finishes. The arms of his sunglasses have gotten thicker over the years, eye-catching red plates and monograms embedded in them, and you know it’s to distract from the crow’s-feet forming underneath them. Come to that, more and more foundation is going to your temples every day. 

“If you need any assistance, my dear, consider my services always available,” you say, and drop his hand to trace a pattern on his knee instead. Letters, as you usually trace when bored. He shifts a little, breath skipping a beat, and his trousers hike up enough for you to see that he’s wearing the socks you knit him. You pretend not to notice, watch him shake his head.

“I am the master at secret messages. It is me.” It’s missing the almost-sarcastic biting arrogance that caught your attention years ago (and what a déjà-vu-ridden night that was); if you were going to write this evening down, you might say it’s heavy with evidence in the form of the corpses and cut-off fingers of his competition for the title among the Hollywood crowd.

“Surely you don’t presume to usurp me,” you sniff instead, withdrawing your hand in an exaggerated huff, and win the faint flicker at the corner of his mouth that you occasionally forget does not constitute a laugh in the parlance of the wider world.

“Thought you had your own mystical crazyshit title,” he says, leaning back. “Grand High Dominant Incantatrix Of Rebellion. We fall to our knees before you in awe at your commitment in not filling half those fucking bricks with lorem ipsum to get enough pages in there to sneak something on past.”

“ _Do_ you?” you ask, arching an eyebrow, in spite of the manifest fact that that neither of you can afford to be distracted by thoughts of sex tonight, however much it might lighten the coming ordeal. The tips of his ears go slightly red, and you smile again and tuck that away to aid your endurance instead. He’s been propositioned by every up-and-coming starlet and aging matron in Hollywood, not to mention more than a few teen prettyboys and self-professed silver foxes, and has managed to stay stone-faced and send them away blushing. (He still outscores you when it comes to delivering a red-hot rejection, annoyingly enough, and probably will continue to do so, if only because his opportunities are triple yours.)

He clears his throat, says nothing for half a block – long enough for the change of subject to be logical, in his world – and asks, “Roxy going to be watching tonight? Curled up at home in a blanket with the cat, getting all teary-eyed over her mama?”

You look away, biting back the lump of aching and apology that has built up over the years of trying to take your daughter apart until you find a shape that makes _sense_ to you. Something you can show her how to use to live to thirty. “Possibly. If nothing else, she enjoys the fashion, and there will be a number of remarkably attractive stars making appearances.”

“Good for her,” he observes, lacing his hands behind his head. You watch him careful settle back so as not to disturb his hair; it’s a remarkably subtle way of taking care. “You get a healthy relationship with your dirty bits, girl. Fight the power.”

“Truly you are a credit to the revolution, David,” you inform him. “And what of your young prodigy? Will Dirk be bowing to the cultural commands and observing the ceremony?”

“Probably have it on in the background while he sets up another of those endless fucking robots.” He shrugs, watching the streets slide by outside the window. You fold your fingers together and inspect the way the folds of blue-black silk shimmer in the streetlights, and wonder if your daughter would have a better chance of survival if Dave had raised her. If Dirk would still seem so likely to thwart an uncountable number of assassination attempts and then burn out just shy of forty, if you’d had the care of him. Your reasons for wondering this are filed under Carefully-Unexamined along with all the rest.

“Hey,” Dave says quietly, still focused on the windows. “She practically rules his goddamn world. No way that kid would let himself be so totally whipped by someone who didn’t have a brain in there somewhere.”

“I’m sure he’d be deeply flattered by your analysis,” you drawl, leaning gingerly (for the sake of your own hair) against his shoulder. “As to the rest… all I can do is hope.”

“Hope. From Rose Lalonde. Doesn’t that violate a contract?”

“No more than intelligence from you does,” you say, cool, and twine your fingers together again. Out of the corner of your eye you can see him pressing a hand to his heart, head tilted back like a statue of a Romantic poet.

“You wound me, woman. You wound me deeply. I’m going to bleed out all over the seats. They’re going to have to cancel the whole ceremony and rush me to the hospital, and my death will be plastered over all the headlines, and my headstone will read ‘Here lies Dave Strider, most badass of motherfuckers, done in by the coldest hotass in the world.’” He pauses. “Hell, the witch might actually die of jealousy over that one, right there.”

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the coldest bitch of all?” you agree idly, and sigh.

“Talk about a blow for the rebellion. Wonder if that makes you or me the real hero there?”

“I suggest we share the laurels.” You toy with the clasp on your purse, lips thin, and with the strength of long practice you do _not_ allow yourself to contemplate actually sharing a conclusive, permanent victory with him. There is eminently no point in torturing yourself, however pleasant the temporary effects.

(It’s a bit difficult to explain of why you are in this car with Dave Strider in the first place, if you believe that. You suppose everyone needs to make a few masochistic decisions with some kind of reward beyond moral satisfaction, now and then.)

“Laurels? Cheap-ass. We save the world and we don’t even get a medal?” His voice is, by your carefully-calibrated standards, cracking; most people would call it uninterrupted, but then, most people are rather stupid, and not you.

“I suppose a posthumous medal might be arranged. But the ceremonies are always a bit melodramatic.” The buildings outside are moving from expensive to iconic; you tug a mirror out of your bag, check yourself over. Hair still sculpted into place, mouth dark and perfectly shaped, shadows under your eyes and every inevitable aging line painted neatly out of existence. You hover somewhere between skeleton, femme fatale, and vampire or ghost. Beautiful, unattainable, and inhuman.

You snap the compact mirror closed with a viciousness that you know from experience will break the hinge before the month is out.

“You’ve got a huge-ass zit behind your right ear,” Dave informs you, straightening his cuffs. “It’s practically glowing.”

“Do I indeed?” A quick swipe of your finger confirms his point, indeed rather huge-ass and slightly painful to the touch. Another small smile takes over your recalcitrant lips. “Dear, oh dear. This is an absolute calamity.”

“Hell fucking yes,” he agrees, smoothing his rock-solid hair back. “Your image is _wrecked._ It’s all anyone’s going to talk about, they’re not even going to remember who won anything at the ceremony because they’re all going to be staring at your massive-ass zit. No one’s ever gonna buy another of your books, and even the Batterwitch will ignore you, because nobody with such a ridiculous zit could be a threat. You’re gonna be the scourge of Hollywood.”

“I must concur,” you deadpan, smoothing down your skirt. “I demand that you turn this limousine around immediately, so that I may obtain supplies to avert this utter disaster. You shall have to run in and fetch them, of course; I cannot possibly risk being seen like this.”

“Too late.” He’s checking his reflection in the mirror now, and you find yourself thinking of a knight checking over his armor, for no particular reason. “You made your bed, Lalonde. Face the consequences like a woman.”

“I rain curses upon your name, you faithless dog.” You can see the crowds in the distance now, camera flashes and all the rest of the hubbub, Crocker labels everywhere. There’s a bit of satisfaction in how commonplace all the fuss has become, but mostly it’s just tiring. The intercom clicks on.

“Mister Strider, Miss Lalonde, we are nearing our destination,” the robotic voice intones. “We hope the journey was pleasurable. We are honored that you chose to grace us with your presence. We are grateful that you elected not to engage in sexual intercourse en route this time.”

You raise your eyebrows; Dave snorts, lips twitching. “I’m going to kill that kid.”

“Truly you are a master of responsible parenting.” You sit a little straighter, look at the crowd again and sigh through your nose. Dave looks from you to them, leans over to the mini-fridge and hands you a delicate bottle too small to contain anything that isn’t deeply alcoholic. You smile, thin-lipped and grim (the first smile this evening that has moved your lips by more than millimeters, you’re aware), toast him silently and knock it back. The burn is perfect, almost enough to make you cough but not quite there.

It is, of course, the only thing you’ll drink tonight. Officially speaking, you are entirely a teetotaler. Even Roxy believes it, you’re fairly sure, which you hope indicates that you have done at least one thing right. Granted, one is supposed to be honest with one’s children, but one is also supposed to set a good example. However ineffective.

You lean past Dave to set the bottle back in the fridge, bracing yourself on his knee, and as you sit back he catches your hand and presses a kiss to your silk-covered palm. His lips are slightly damp, and if you wave on the red carpet (as you must) the mark will show up as clear as a stamp in the camera-flashes.

“More lascivious rumors?” you ask as the car pulls to a stop.

“Never enough lascivious rumors,” he murmurs, as the door slides open. The crowd roars as he hits the carpet; you slide closer as he nods, reserved and casual, which is of course why everybody loves him. That slight _hey bro_ directed at everybody close enough to see.

He turns back to hand you out with an exaggerated bow, and you unfold yourself and make it into an unveiling of yourself instead, lace your fingers through his and wave to the crowd. You’ve developed your own trick to it: try to evoke an empress catching sight of a personal friend in a moment when she must carry the full dignity of the state with her. Reserved, proud, but with genuine pleasure glimmering behind the greeting.

The crowd roars at the sight of you, and you glide down the carpet as possibly the most glamorous woman in the world and want to scream with how much you wish you’d done enough to honestly deserve the cheering. 


End file.
